In the documentary No Impact Man, a New York City family attempted a yearlong experiment of living with ‘zero’ environmental impacts in response to a natural world in crisis from climate change and ecological limitations. The mass media was highly captivated by the spectacle of the family’s experiment and ran stories such as the 2007 New York Times’ article, “The Year Without Toilet Paper,” that depicted the family as strange and extreme. Implicit in the film and the media coverage is the assumption that it is possible and even necessary for people to have zero or minimal impact on nature to avert catastrophic climate change. However, this assumption imposes an impossible, false, and possibly damaging separation of the person and the environment. Sustainability, in the face of challenges like climate change and ecological limits like peak oil, must be understood with people situated within social and physical contexts that involve reciprocal relationships by which people both affect and are influenced by the social and material context. …I constructed this recommended reading list in order to present an interdisciplinary range of the implications of life, place, and justice posed by academic deliberations about the meanings, missteps, and opportunities of sustainability.

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